Tag: shell script

There are various methods for calling shell commands in Ruby. Most of them either not wait at all for the results, or wait until the command execution is finished.

In many cases it is ok, because programmers want shell command results for further processing. Unfortunately this means that while a shell command runs, there’s no way to get partial results and process them (multitasking FTW). It also means that all the results have to be buffered. It might be (for a long running intensive commands) a source of memory leaks in your applications.

Luckily there’s a great way to process shell command data in a stream (row after row).

The task

Lets assume that we want to find first 10 files in our file system that match a given pattern (note that it could be achieved way better with just shell commands but it’s not the point here).

The bad way

Here’s a typical code to achieve that (and believe me – I’ve encountered solutions like that in production systems):

We had to use nearly 700MB of memory and it took us 4.7 seconds just to find few matching files. The time wouldn’t be that bad, but memory usage like this is a bit overkill. It is bad mostly because find / lists all the files and the more things we have, the bigger output we get. This also means that our code will behave differently dependent on what machine it will run. For some we might not have memory problems but for others it might grow over 1GB.

Now imagine what would happen if we would execute this code in 25 Sidekiq concurrent workers…

Of course with GC running we might not kill our machine, but memory spikes will look kinda weird and suspicious.

The good way – hello IO.popen

Instead of waiting for all the files from find / command, let’s process each line separately. To do so, we can use the IO.popen method.

IO.popen runs the specified command as a subprocess; the subprocess’s standard input and output will be connected to the returned IO object. (source)

It means that we can execute find command and feed our main process with every line of the output separately.

Note: IO.popen executed without a block will not wait for the subprocess to finish!

require 'memory_profiler'
report = MemoryProfiler.report do
pattern = /test/
selection = []
IO.popen('find / 2> /dev/null') do |io|
while (line = io.gets) do
# Note - here you could use break to get out and sigpipe
# subprocess to finish it early. It will however mean that your subprocess
# will stop running early and you need to test if it will stop without
# causing any trouble
next if selection.size > 10
selection << line if line =~ pattern
end
end
selection[0..10]
end
report.pretty_print

When you go with your code out of Ruby scope and when you execute shell commands, it is always good to ask yourself those questions. Sometimes achieving stream processing ability can be done only when the system is being built, so it is really good to think about that before the implementation. In general I would recommend to always consider streaming in every place where we cannot exactly estimate the external command result size. That way you won’t be surprised when there will be a lot more data that initially anticipated.

Note: Attentive readers will notice, that I didn’t benchmark memory used in the subprocess. That is true, however it was irrelevant to our case as the shell command for all the cases was exactly the same.